Re: Time for Software

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

My hope is that when Arne starts taking all that good data that someone in 
Chile will decide it is worth operating a system to match the northern 
hemisphere data that Arne will take.   But time is running out.  It gets 
harder for me to get out of bed every day, and the thought of a flight to 
Chile with a bunch of stuff does not excite me.

Meanwhile I plan to partially compensate by running more cameras.  OK, the 
data will not be as good, but still worthwhile, I think.  The best solution 
would be for some southern observatory to take on the job of opening the 
doors and keeping the rain off the camera while the tass members operate it 
from the comfort of their homes.  I suppose they would also have to load CD 
roms for the output data and mail it off to us.

The politics is such that this might not happen.  To run anything at an 
observatory takes money, as we have found out from our negotiations with 
Mt. Wilson.

My view is that I could take better data if I were to carry a Mark IV out 
to a good spot.   But I could only do this a couple of weeks a year.  I 
think that it is also useful to take a lot more data of lower quality.  I 
accept the limitations of what can be done with the data.

Tom Droege

At 11:44 AM 8/3/00 -0700, you wrote:
The 200-night estimate is for photometric nights
or partial nights.  Usually, parts of 300 nights/year
are usable for some sort of photometry here, but
I really would rather concentrate on getting the
all-sky calibration and let the sites with less
photometric weather worry about the differential
stuff and variable discoveries.  So I bet I could
still outdo Tom's 6-camera system here with the
2-camera system if that was my desire!  Good sites,
like Chile and parts of South Africa, are quite
amazing to behold for those coming from the MidWest.
Arne